How surprised would you be, if I walked up to you and told you that every human needs oxygen to survive? I'm assuming that you wouldn't at all be surprised - you might start feeling a little uneasy that a random stranger walked up to you with such a crazy question, but you wouldn't be surprised by the we-need-oxygen fact. Apparently, people are surprised that Ubuntu is not a democracy.

[q]How is that? openSUSE ships on single CDs (one with KDE SC and one with GNOME) with pretty much the same software collection as Ubuntu/Kubuntu etc.
The only major difference is slightly different software versions shipped because of openSUSE's longer testing period (2 months extra).

Don't know how they manage to do that. It boots up slowly, and using YaST is extremely slow, even for simple tasks

Huh? Why?

Just still angry about them removing madwifi from the liveCD when ath5k was still alpha-grade software that couldn't even connect to a network. Network drivers should be available right avay, how are we supposed to get them otherwise ? (Except by carrying around outdated RPMs)

Which standards does Mandriva not support?

Network manager. They keep using their ugly network configuration interface where you have to go through several layers of menus and obscure windows in order to connect to a Wi-fi network.

It boots up slowly, and using YaST is extremely slow, even for simple tasks

openSUSE boots slower, because -- being a more conservative distro -- it didn't (yet) adopt Upstart. openSUSE still uses classic SysV init. SysV isn't super fancy, but is tried and works.
That has nothing to do with "bloat".

YaST works smooth for me since 11.0. Package management was slow in 10.x, because it was completely rewritten and had a rocky birth, but that's more than 2 years ago.